How to Prevent AI from Destroying the World

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Isaac Azimov

A Beautiful Man Is Hard to Find

 

Women and men are different.

This should not be controversial. It seems to me that anyone finding this controversial is shockingly lacking in empathy.

Since the Sixties and feminism, we have been fighting against this truth. Feminism insisted that any difference was just a role forced on women by society.

Perhaps the rise of the “transgender” movement is at least in part the inevitable rebellion against this claim. Its insistence on “gender” as a core of one’s identity is a direct contradiction to feminism. To feminism, “gender” is not a trait you are born with, but a set of arbitrarily behaviours forced on you. Otherwise feminism makes no sense.

Transgenders insist there is a female or a male soul. Otherwise you could not be “trans.”

Leave aside the other questions raised by transgenderism: whether gender is independent of sex, and whether one can be “born into the wrong body.”

There are three transcendental values: truth, good, and beauty. They are the goals of existence. They bring value to life. We are created in order to seek these three things, and to express these three things.

Of these three, it is obvious that women, not men, are most responsible for beauty. Women are more visually attractive than men; women care about being attractive; men don’t. This is not just to attract men sexually; women definitely also dress and make up for other women, for the sake of abstract beauty. Both men and women would rather look at a woman than a man on a magazine cover.

If you introduce a woman into a home or office or business, she will instantly go about trying to make it more beautiful, more comfortable. You leave men on their own at a workplace, and it will be functional, no more.

Cultures that devalue beauty, like Protestantism, or Islam, will devalue women. Cultures that value beauty, like France, Italy, or Latin America, will value women more highly.

This is why feminism began in the Protestant countries. It was here women were devalued. Although it has since spread to Catholics as well; due to the overwhelming cultural influence of America.

And why does a man marry a woman? The question has come up online recently: MGTOW. Is it worth all the insults, demands, and worries, the risks of ruinous divorce, “just for a vagina”? What else does a woman bring to the relationship?

This, after all, is what feminism has left us with.

But properly, a man marries to bring beauty into his life. To make his house a home. Not just her physical beauty, but her charm, her attitude—for this is her proper role, to be supportive, “inner beauty.” And her ability to decorate the living space. And her ability to cook, which is a form of beauty, appealing to the sense of taste. If she is a good wife, she brings grace and comfort to his life. Along with the joy of children.

This is what a good wife should do. Feminism has devalued it all, and women have come to neglect and distain all of this. Reducing them to no more than second-rate men with vaginas.

And now we must acknowledge that men too have their role in civilization and the human enterprise. As feminism would deny. They are more than bicycles, more than a means to an end.

Women are the guardians of beauty; men are the guardians of truth. Men are born with an internal compass that points towards the North Star. Women will believe anything; men will want proof. This is why Jesus, who obviously knew what he was doing, chose only male apostles. We should not second-guess God. And this is why St. Paul said women should be silent in church. It is not their role to lead and teach, any more than it is the role of a man to wear makeup and give fetching smiles. Either has gone off the rails.

Not incidentally, we have made a grave mistake by giving the teaching profession over almost entirely to women. This is not their role. Notice that, in the New Testament, Jesus’s genealogy is traced back to David through Joseph—even though Jospeh is not his biological father. This is because the role of the father, of he man, is to guide and educate, to pass on truths. In this sense, Joseph and his genealogy are fully relevant.

If we value truth, but not beauty, as in Protestant (and now secular) Northern Europe, this will look like a misogynist view. If we value beauty as well as truth, it will not. It is both received and revealed wisdom. It is common sense.

And what of the third transcendental value, the good? Indeed, this is the central of the three: “and the greatest of these is love.” We were created to choose the good, of our free will.

Men and women seem to have an equal role here; but being good means different things for each. Goodness means justice, on the one hand; mercy on the other. In America, to say someone is good, you say “he is honest.” In China, you say “he is kind.” And these are different things.

Good women are kind and merciful. Good men are honest and just.

We need both. We need both men and women in our culture, and in our individual lives. And we have lost this.

The Loss of Beauty

 

“In evangelization,” Bishop Baron has said, “start with beauty.”

There is a problem with this. Bishop Barron is assuming that beauty, unlike ethics, is accessible to everyone. Many people do not get beauty. Perhaps as many as do not get ethics.

Attending a writers’ meet last evening, I was disappointed that nobody else pointed out the beautiful turns of phrase the featured writer used. “Warmoon.” “None of man, none of nonsense.” “Only the steel husk of empires.” 

“He really ought to be a poet,” I observed.

“Why? You can have beautiful language in prose.” 

You can, up to a point, but then what is the difference between prose and poetry? Poetry is, definitively, beautiful language: “the best words in the best order,” per Coleridge. If the beauty of the language is the focus, that is poetry, not prose.

I gather that poetry was invisible to those present, because beauty in language was invisible to those present—none of them, after all, noticed it in the passage. To them, although writers, writing was apparently about entertainment—an exciting and captivating plot.

One can, of course, have an exciting or captivating plot in either poetry or prose. See Beowulf, or the Odyssey. But put it in beautiful language, and it is poetry.

Even in a supposed poetry group I attended a week ago, a group of published poets, I found no sensitivity to beauty of language. All were to submit a poem on the theme, “on Earth we are all briefly gorgeous.” All submitted, with no special elegance, an expression of some trauma they experienced personally; as if poetry was about venting emotions or grievances. It was only a matter of “my suffering is greater than your suffering.”

This is psychotherapy, not poetry. 

Worse, psychotherapy doesn’t work. It leads only to narcissism.

When I remarked to a well-intentioned friend that I found a particular woman unutterably beautiful, he assumed I wanted to hook up with her. Despite being married. 

We seem to commonly associate beauty with mere sexual attractiveness. With a physical rather than a spiritual pleasure.

Most people say they get a sunset. I wonder… do they? Or do they just know they are supposed to?

Most people seem to like music. But are they reacting only to some physical sensation, like the urge to move your body and feel the healthy stretch of muscles and deep breathing?

Entire religions seem not to get beauty: Islam, with its iconoclasm, banning visual representations. Protestantism, wanting once to ban dancing, the theatre, and celebrations like Christmas. Such things were, according to the Puritans, if not idolatrous, sinfully frivolous. 

This is disturbing, because beauty is one of the three transcendentals, along with the true and the good, from which value itself comes. God himself is definitely, as St. Augustine formulated it, perfect beauty, perfect truth or being, and perfect good.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!”

To be insensitive to beauty is to turn away from God. 

And I think we are losing our sense of beauty in recent years. The world is getting uglier. The arts seem moribund. 

Perhaps Bishop Barron is right, however. Jesus did not come for everyone; he makes this clear in the Beatitudes. Perhaps sensitivity to beauty is the sign that you are of his flock.

Cultures differ widely in their ability to appreciate beauty. The English, Germans, and Americans have no sense of beauty. The Romance nations, France, Spain, Italy, are good at it. So are the Slavs, and the Celts. The Koreans are much better at it than the Japanese or Chinese. 

In Canada, it is easy to see the difference. Toronto has little beauty. Even the people are slovenly in dress. In Montreal or Quebec City, there is beauty around every corner. The beauty in Ontario is only in small towns settled by the Irish or Scots: Westport, Perth, Elora. Saint John, heavily settled by the Irish, is awash in beauty, the houses brightly coloured.

Why the difference? To some extent, no doubt, religion—the difference between Catholic and Protestant—has its influence. But it also seems to me that the ability to appreciate beauty is related in some mysterious way to the experience of suffering. Jesus more or less says this in the Beatitudes. 

The Way of the Pilgrim

 

Why are we here?

Many people plainly suppose we are here to seek pleasure. A high school friend used to say “we’re just two ends of a gastrointestinal tract.” A hotel co-worker said sex was what made life worthwhile. 

This is the perspective of an animal or a robot. It is also a will-o-the-wisp. Without hunger, food does not satisfy. Without abstinence, sex is just work. It all becomes addiction, and pleasure is gone.

Some people think life is about achieving “success.” Success here means power and social authority over other people. This is actively active evil. And it certainly does not lead to contentment. “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown.” 

Some people say that life is about having children, and giving them a start in life. This is the Darwinian perspective; the Bible too does say “go forth and multiply.” Kids are part of our job, at least. But it does not entirely satisfy. If your life is meaningless, so are your children’s lives. 

Some people say life is about sacrifice of self to the collective: one owes ultimate allegiance to one’s parents, one’s community, and one’s homeland. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” But this is idolatry: one’s nation, one’s government, or one’s parents can be either good or bad. This leads to “good Germans,” Fascism, racism, and nepotism.

Some say that life is about going about doing good to others. And it is, in detail: we are to clothe the naked and feed the hungry, when we encounter them. But this can easily become a form of ego-worship. The Bible warns that if we do good and are seen to do good, we already have our reward; we are acting in self-interest. God does not need you to save the world; realistically, things are already going as he intends. I suspect figures like Mother Teresa. 

The meaning of life is to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful. 

This is necessarily so, because truth, beauty, and good are the only things of value in themselves. They do not derive their value from anything else, and everything else is valuable only to the extent that it is true, good, or beautiful.

These values can be falsified and misunderstood. People often confuse beauty with sexual allure, for example. People misconstrue fact as truth, truth as fact. Facts are only one form of truth, and a trivial form. And people misrepresent goodness in many ways.

It is not public charity. It is also not being “nice,” and getting along with everyone. That requires having no principles, and giving everyone what they want. This is, at best, moral cowardice, at worst devious self-interest. It requires aiding and abetting evil whenever it appears.

True good is justice. Not to be confused with the current leftist concept of “social justice,” a euphemism for injustice. Justice means giving everyone what they deserve on their merits.

How does one, in practical terms, do this?

First, in art. Good art manifests beauty. Art is adding beauty to the world. This is an intrinsic good, even if no other mortal sees this beauty. God does, and with him you are building the New Jerusalem, which the Bible describes to us as a vast work of art. But if possible, the Bible also tells us to “let your light shine,” and be a leaven to those around you.

Good art must also be true. As Keats said, “truth is beauty, beauty truth; that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” One may speak truth outside of art, but inside of art, you must. And speaking truth outside of art can be dangerous. Jesus warned: “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” So he spoke in parables. Art is intended, as Emily Dickenson said, to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Those who have eyes to see, will see.

Good art must also serve justice. We are aware of this when, for example, we read or watch a play. We will rebel, intellectually and emotionally, whether watching tragedy or comedy, if the resolution does not serve justice. Karma must come around. No cheap happy endings, and no gratuitous deaths.

Beyond art is something more: the practice of a religion. To bind yourself to a religion is, in effect, to make your life a work of art. Art shows the way; religion IS the way.

But there is no just going through the motions here, no “church on Sunday,” no hypocrisy. We are talking of full commitment, of “prayer without ceasing.” That is the ultimate. That is sainthood.

Of Poetry, Written in Times of Peril

 

Does poetry mean anything? My friend Antiochus says no. The meaning is just what each reader takes from it. This is the postmodern view.

He writes “what about when one person reads the poem one way and is absolutist in his view about what it means, and another person reads the poem a second way and is absolutist in his view about what it means?”

That is when discussion, and learning, can begin. They each present their evidence and their arguments to arrive at the truth. One is right, and the other is wrong; or perhaps, they are both wrong, and the discussion will reveal this.

If, on the other hand, everyone is simply entitled to their own interpretation, there can be no discussion, no learning, no movement towards truth, and no agreement. No contact of souls. At worst, they struggle to the death for dominance; or they try to shout one another into silence. As with our current politics. Or else, more happily, they must simply ignore each other. You say the poem looks like a camel; I say it looks like a lobster. It cannot matter what you think. We have made no meaningful contact, we have learned nothing, and neither of us is closer to truth.

Let me back up and explain my absolute commitment to absolutism. I believe, agreeing with philosophers stretching back at least to Plato, and not only in the West, that the purpose and meaning of human life is to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—the three great absolutes. This must be so, because we perceive these three things as of self-evident value.

Anything we do that is not directed towards achieving one of these three goals is wasted time and effort. So if poetry does not itself strive to express some truth, it is to that extent without value. If we, in turn, do not strive to find the truth of the poem, we are just rolling stones up a hill.

You might argue, I imagine, that poetry is just about Beauty, not Truth or Goodness. If so, it is of relatively less value than something that combines Beauty and Truth. But I agree with Keats: “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth; that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Transcendental values cannot really be separated. Nothing is truly beautiful that is not also both true and good; nothing can be good that is not also true; and so forth. The beauty we perceive in a poem is an intuitive initial perception of truth and goodness.

Antiochus writes that, if someone misinterprets a poem, “that's on the poet's shoulders because the clarity wasn't there.” I disagree. Being easy to understand is not traditionally the task of the poet, or of poetry. TS Eliot actually criticizes Rudyard Kipling for being too easy to understand: “We expect to have to defend a poet against the charge of obscurity; we have to defend Kipling against the charge of excessive lucidity.”

No doubt a poet should strive to be no more obscure than necessary—Eliot is saying that, implicitly, too. Poets must be defended against that charge. But a good poem should be, will be, difficult to understand. Because it is speaking of some deep truth, and deep truths are intrinsically hard to grasp.  

Heraclitus: “One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road―so deep is its logos."

Show me an easy poem, and I’ll show you doggerel.

Antiochus argues that anyone’s “honest evaluation, with no underlying agenda, of what [a poem] means is legitimate.”

Does this mean that it is impossible to be honest, yet wrong? People once honestly believed the sun orbits the earth; I once honestly believed Santa put those presents in the stockings. Or does “legitimate” mean something other than true here? Is it possible for an opinion to be wrong, yet “legitimate”? If it only means “sincere,” Antiochus has said only that honest opinions are honest opinions.

A bit off topic, but Antiochus also wants to insist that you can say all the same things in prose that you can in poetry. Let me explain why I believe that is not so. Prose is the written word: it lives on the page. Poetry is often called the spoken word; but that is wrong. Poetry is the remembered word; it lives in memory, as a new bit of mental furniture, our programming. Accordingly, it can accomplish things that prose cannot. On an analogy with medicine, poetry does mental surgery, and permanently alters a soul. Prose too may heal, but like a pill, its direct effects do not last.

This is of course a generalization. Plots, characters, even verbatim passages of prose can linger in the mind. But poetry, properly assimilated, is remembered word for word.

Antiochus improperly then uses the example of bad poets to argue that poetry is not in fact a difficult form:

“I have known a lot of bad poets, beginning with the plethora of teenaged girls in high school and continuing through to creative writing classes and continuing further to published writers of whose work I could make neither head nor tail, and I could never see that the poet's intent was to write something he or she couldn't say in prose.”

This is like using the example of your kid sister’s caterwauling violin practice to show that it is easy to play the violin. It proves the opposite. There are far more good prose writers than poets, and there is far more good prose in the world than good poetry. It is easier to prescribe a pill than to do brain surgery.

Leonard Cohen refused on at least one occasion to call himself a poet, saying that poetry is a judgement, and nobody has the right to pass that judgement on themselves. Recall Coleridge’s definition of poetry, “the best words in the best order.” That is a high bar to clear. Most contemporary so-called “poetry” is nothing but self-absorbed prose without grammar or punctuation. It could easily be computer-generated—and has been.

Trapped in a World You Never Made?

What, after all, is the meaning of life?

The common (post)modern stance is that we do not know. We wander our wasteland, waiting for Godot, and Godot does not show.

Some say the meaning of life is 42. Good joke. We are less than laboratory rats.

Or it is up to each of us to simply invent or construct a meaning. As if it were possible to immaculately conceive meaning from meaninglessness, something from nothing.

This sad conception has led to ugly things. It seems to me that it has led to the present cancel culture, rampant censorship, unfriending, shouting down those with whom we disagree. Everyone is losing all their friends. Many are losing livelihoods. To do such things amounts to spiritual murder: when we stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen, we are declaring the other a non-person. And it leads on an unwavering trajectory to actual physical murder, perhaps on a mass scale.

For what, after all, can we do, if we have invented our meaning by some act of will, and it conflicts with the next guy’s meaning? As it inevitably will. There is no higher authority to which to appeal. So there is no way to settle the conflict but to pretend he or she does not exist; to silence them; or to eliminate them.

At the same time, from the same cause, at least in the developed world, indications are that the incidence of “mental illness,” and suicide, and death by overdose, alcohol, or “accident,” is growing by spiraling upward seven-league strides.

We have gotten ourselves into a dark place, with this notion that life has no meaning.

Is it right? Is it all Godot’s fault?

It is worth pointing out that life does have meaning. At least, everyone thought it did until quite recently. Until the early 20th century, the meaning of life was uncontroversial. And no, it did not depend on anyone’s particular sect or religion.

The meaning of life was to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This was understood by the ancient Greek philosophers, and did not change with the coming of the great monotheisms—except that they called the ultimate Good, Truth, and Beauty “God.”

As did the Hindus, independently. Classifying in terms of the human experience of God as opposed to God’s own qualities, they arrived at a similar trinity: Sat, Cit, Ananda, roughly translating as Truth, Consciousness, and Bliss. Bliss describes the aesthetic experience, and corresponds to Beauty. “Consciousness” corresponds to the Good—morality is at base the awareness of the independent consciousness of others, treating another as an independent sentient being instead of a thing.

But, you say, there is no Truth, just as there is no God. You have sought and sought, and found none.

Let us point out first that that claim is contradictory. “There is no truth” is a claimed truth. Of course, if true, it is false.

All you can say, then, is that you have not yet found truth; you cannot claim you know there is none. And if you do say there is none, of course, you are not looking.

Were you ever really looking? Speaking from my experience, those who claim to be such perennial seekers of Truth are those who recoil most dramatically from anyone who claims to have found Truth. Religious believers, most notably. This is contradictory: they seem to dismiss out of hand the possibility that anyone has found Truth. If so, they cannot really be looking for it.

It seems to me that the claim that they cannot find Truth is also easily and trivially disproven. If you insist you have found no truth, are you really prepared to deny the Pythagorean theorem, or that 2 + 2 = 4? Are you prepared to ignore the Law of Gravity in your own daily actions?

But, you will say, if there is Truth, there is no Good. Morality is just what each society agrees on: it is “socially constructed.”

That leaves you with no possible argument that Hitler did anything wrong. He was, after all, the duly elected social authority. You similarly have no argument against such cultural practices as child sacrifice, slavery, or widow burning.

To the contrary, Kant has shown that the moral imperative is self-evident and beyond question. It is enshrined, almost word for word, in all known moral codes: do to others as you would have them do. Respect other sentient beings.

You will then say, at least, that there is no Beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that much.

This is a consolation for physically ugly people like me; we all know it is not really true. While not everyone will find a given thing beautiful, results of a survey will be far from random. Balance, harmony, clarity, seem to be consistent elements. We say that beauty fades, or is often a matter of trickery; but then we mean gross physical beauty, not the Beauty referred to as transcendental. The beauty of art is something else, and does not trick or fade.

Next you will say, but why are these three qualities, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, to be valued? The question cannot really be answered, because their value is self-evident. It is in our ROM. Rather, we determine the value of all other things by the degree to which they are either good and useful, true, or beautiful. Posit, if you like, a divine programmer. There is a point beyond which, in self-knowledge, we cannot go.

How then did we get so knocked off the path in modern times? Why are we sleeping in ditches in Eliot’s Waste-Land?

I can only speculate. I think it was and is a disease of the Humanities. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was unified by religion; theology was the queen of the sciences. The first schools and the first universities, everywhere, were religious institutions. This is true in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or Confucian lands. It is universal. Knowledge therefore had a plot and a direction.

With the success in the West over the last few centuries of empirical science, it gained such prestige that it tended to supplant religion and philosophy as the perceived centre of knowledge: now physics and not theology was the queen of the sciences.

For all its impressive success, science does not work well in this role. It is not possible to unify all knowledge on physical terms; most of the real world and of real human experience is on the metaphysical, spiritual plane. We are more than robots with sensing organs.

With the growing prestige of the sciences, the Humanities, over the past two hundred years or more, have been struggling to be “scientific.” This has spawned the “social sciences.” Yet as is increasingly apparent with each generation, every attempt to put the human world on a scientific basis has failed. It must always necessarily fail. Marxism seemed promising, but was wrong. Freudianism was wrong. Behaviourism was wrong. Chomsky was wrong. Keynes was wrong.

All this while physical sciences were building towers and bridges, arcing from strength to strength. No surprise if it was demoralizing. The Humanities/Social Sciences are depressed.

Yet rather than realizing or admitting that they have been hunting in the wrong place with the wrong dogs, scholars in the humanities/social sciences have thrown up their hands and said, increasingly since the Second World War, “There is no truth.” “There is no meaning.” This is the sin of acedia, of spiritual sloth, of despair.

They have then extended this to empirical science as well. It is just not tolerable to accept that science has truth, and they do not. This is the sin of pride; for acedia and pride are interlinked.

But you, gentle reader, need not be so misled. You need not retreat into some personal “reality,” some cherished hallucination, whether drug-induced or otherwise. And you need not then murder your neighbour to maintain it.

Wake up. Smell coffee. Seek truth.

Practical or Transcendent Morality

Relics of the Rwandan genocide.

My good buddy Cyrus rejects my contention that there are transcendent values: most famously, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

In conversation last night he insisted that morality could be derived entirely from the pragmatic needs of society. “Do unto others” simply ends up being in our mutual interest. So it is all empirical.

I disagree. It might be entirely to a society’s—that is, a group’s—benefit to allow or encourage murder of some distinct target group. Then the murderers, after all, might get all their stuff. This works fine so long as the designated group is relatively powerless, and distinct enough that no members of the dominant group fear the same force being turned on them in future.

Whenever some society has considered itself free from traditional moral constraints, this is exactly what has happened, and happened soon: mass murder of some vulnerable and distinct “other” group. The Jews or the disabled in Nazi Germany, the kulaks or Ukrainians in Soviet Russia, the unborn today.

Murder is the most dramatic example, but by the same principle, a society that does not accept transcendent values can equally justify any other sort of wrong against the vulnerable group: lying, theft, enslavement, and so forth.

So the practical needs of society cannot produce morality.

Hell and Damnation

A further thought on how many go to Hell; mentioned here some time back as a current controversry between Church Militant and Bishop Barron.

The meaning and purpose of life is not obscure. It is to seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. This comes in the West from Plato; but it also seems to correspond to the Hindu trinity of sat, sit, ananda, usually translated, inaccurately, as “being, consciousness, bliss.” Sat is the Good, honesty; sit is Truth (true knowledge); ananda is aesthetic appreciation. These three things, at minimum, are of intrinsic value, and their presence gives value to all else.

Although this seems self-evident once pointed out—the real or true is of more value than the false, and the good is of more value than the bad—it is also true that some people—many people—do not seek the True, the Beautiful, or the Good. Some will insist the Truth is socially determined, or the Good is up for grabs, or our idea of Beauty is purely a matter of taste. The whole Postmodernist thing is to deny the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. And a huge proportion of people are assertively postmodern in this way.

This is ultimately cynical. The advantage of rejecting Truth and the Good, even if self-evident, is that it leaves you free to do or believe whatever you want.

Heaven is Good, True, and Beautiful to a maximum degree. To seek these transcendent values is to seek Heaven; and to seek God, who is a perfect being, so perfect Goodness, perfect Being, perfect Beauty. The immediate presence of God is definitive of Heaven. Those who are not seeking them are, therefore, rejecting God, and choosing to turn from the path to Heaven. They are declaring in favour of Hell, and against Heaven, as their intended destination.

And this makes sense in Catholic doctrine: God, being all-merciful, wants no one to end up in Hell, but some of us choose Hell for ourselves. Anyone who is not seeking the Good, the True, and the Beautiful has quite expressly chosen not to go to Heaven.

Sin, in turn, is when we choose anything else before the Good, the True, or the Beautiful. For example, immediate physical pleasure, or social status, or self-regard. These are the three great temptations: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Any of us can slip up in this way at any time. The difference between the saved and the damned, however, is that the saved will understand this as sin, feel regret, and eventually repent. The damned will refuse to accept this, and deny they have done anything wrong.

They may instead protest, like Pontius Pilate, “What is Truth?”

The Meaning of Life

Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Monty Python's final movie was titled “The Meaning of Life.” The gist of it was that nobody knows what it is; we're all wandering around clueless. Douglas Adams implied the same by declaring randomly that the meaning of life was 42.

This is actually quite a new problem. Everyone used to know. It popped up more or less postwar, with dadaism, then postwar again with existentialism. Their blank black banner is now carried by postmodernism.

Until perhaps the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, everyone knew what life was about. And we really still all do in our hearts; for it is graven there. We were not made without instructions. As the ancient philosophers noted often enough, life is the quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are the things with intrinsic value, and which bestow value and meaning on all else.

Note this does not even require a belief in God; this much is self-evident to polytheists as much as Christians. Plato and Aristotle knew it; it's in the Bhagavad Gita.

Postmodernists and their tribe insist, counter to this, that there is no Truth, no Good, and no Beauty. This is just not a philosophically tenable position.

Truth: Two plus two equals four; it does not equal seven. There's truth. Today is Monday, and not Friday. There's truth. The distinction is not difficult to see; no sane person can miss it. A commitment to Truth requires you to go where reason and the available evidence lead; rather than just believing what you want to believe, what others tell you to believe, whatever first comes to mind, or what seems in your self-interest to believe.

It is a blood-red herring to object, as postmodernists will, that you cannot be certain that you have the absolute truth. So what? No glass is ever entirely full either. There is still a critical difference between full and empty. I don't have all the money in the world. That does not mean I have no money.

And, of course, the simple statement “there is no truth” self-contradicts. It cannot, by its own terms, be true.

The Good: That morality is not relative is demonstrated planly enough by the fact that evey major religion and moral system bases itself explicitly on the same maxim: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It can be and is formulated in different ways as well, but it appears almost word for word in this same way everywhere. There is no disagreement or ambiguity here; nothing relative. Kant too found this the one irrefutable imperative of human existence: do unto others. Treat others as an end, not a means. If how this is worked out in detail can vary, so can how we build a bridge; but our calculations are all still based on the same law of gravity. Accordingly, we can plainly say there are better and worse ways to build a bridge. We can judge moral codes as more or less strict; not as randomly different.

The Beautiful: No, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. For example, show pictures of women of various races to men of various races; contrary to what is sometimes claimed, their evaluation of who is beautiful is consistent across all cultural lines. There is, objectively, such a thing as good taste and bad taste. It makes no differencce that some people have consistently bad taste; some people also do poorly at math. Statues like the Winged Victory of Samothrace can still be easily recognized as sublimely beautiful, two thousand five hundred years later and several thousands of miles away.

The question here is why so many people so often deny what is about as self-evident as anything in existence.

The Gospel of John tells why:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

Once you turn away from the Good, generally in favour of self-interest and for animal pleasures, you will soon deny that any true good exists. Because it stands in condemnation of you. And, as philosophers have pointed out, each of the three transcendentals implies the other: without Good, there can be no Truth, without Truth, no Beauty, and without Beauty, no Good.

Therefore, once you turn decisively from the Good, you develop a vested interest in denying Good, Truth, and Beauty, all three, altogether. If you stumble on a truth or a good deed or some beautiful thing, you will want to deny it, conceal it from others, or, ideally, destroy it.

This naturally divides mankind into two opposing tribes; which Jesus called the sheep and the goats. The sheep keep building; the goats keep trying to tear down. Sheep may stray, through temptation or through folly, but their resolve is to keep on the path to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Goats do not acknowledge this call. They begin by merely doing as they please in the moment. But over time they come to try also to distract the sheep away from the goal. They will actually seek and promote the false, the bad, and the ugly for their own sake, and to crush the good. Evil is an addiction.

It serves a certain inevitable justice then if, as Jesus says, the sheep at worst, if lost, suffer a time in purgatory, while the goats descend to hell forever. It has been their choice: they rejected that road, knowing where it led. If you refuse the path to Truth and Good and Beauty, you will not arrive at Truth and Good and Beauty, will you?

Understanding this, one can see, by the popularity of postmodernist views, that our Western culture is currently in great peril. It is urging us on to perdition. It obliges us, for example, to expressly claim to believe things that are untrue; such as that people can simply decide for themselves what sex they are. It often now promotes art that is deliberately ugly. It requires us not only to tolerate abortion, but to pay for it through our taxes or health premiums. It attacks any established moral system, such as Catholicism or Confucianism. These are definite attempts to prevent others from pursuing the Good, the True, or the Beautiful.

This was claimed as well of cultures in the Old Testament: the Canaanite, the cities of the plain, the Philistine. It did not end well; for the sake of all concerned, such cultures had to be wiped out. As Carthage or Nazi Germany had to be wiped out.

This begins to sound very gloomy. Is Western civilization doomed?

I trust not. I see no obvious better alternative. If the West has gone barking mad, I have lived in China, in South Korea, and in the Arabian Gulf, and found those cultures, quite different one from the other, to be even madder, even further estranged from the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Perhaps the Trump phenomenon, for all its wartiness, is the first glimmer of a new Great Awakening in the US, that can reverse this downward spiral. Perhaps too the countries of the old European East Bloc carry the flame of truth. Living in the Philippines, I find the average Filipino strikingly sane in contrast to the typical Canadian: perhaps the newer Christian and Westernizing cultures of Africa and Asia will lead a revival.

The Meaning of Life: Not 42

Not all religions are equal. Why would they be? How could they be? All religions may and must include all that is needful, but if they are different, they cannot be equal. I have studied all the major world religions, and, while I love them all, I frankly do have favourites.

Traditionally in Western thought, starting with Plato, with traces back to Parmenides, there are three transcendentals: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are the three qualities that abide in all things, and to the degree that they subsist in something, give a thing its value. In other words, they are the measures of all value. Put another way, they are the proper goals or objectives of human life.

Is this an arbitrary list? I cannot feel so. It seems to me that the proposition is self-evident once proposed. One cannot seem to superimpose some other, external standard by which goodness or truth can be measured and determined to have or not have value. Other, that is, than in terms of one of the other transcendentals. And so as well with beauty. These seem to be genuine a prioris. There may be others, and others have been proposed, but at a minimum, these three.

Now, given that these three are what they appear to be, the goals of existence, a religion can be evaluated on the basis of how well it recognizes and accommodates all three in its concept of God or the sacred, and of righteous human life.

On this score, I think Catholic Christianity has to ge the highest score, objectively. It is the one, to my eye, that most fully emphasizes all three aspects of life and of the divine: the faith, the morals and the ceremonials and sacramentals. I felt this in a deep, intuitive way before I thought to apply the doctrine of the universals, but the doctrine of the universals confirms it.

Take Islam first, as a comparison, since it is so much in the news. I find it bereft of a proper appreciation for Beauty. It is deeply suspicious of the arts: of painting, music, dance. Walk into a mosque, and there is very little there but bare walls. To me, this makes it feel barren and lifeless. 

Radha, image of the devotee, with Krishna.

Now take Buddhism or Hinduism. They seem to avoid the issue of the Good. They lack a strong moral dimension. Buddhist seems stronger on the Truth, Hinduism on Beauty, but both are relatively lacking in moral emphasis. To me, this makes them feel ultimately unserious, ephemeral. For East Asian culture in general, this lack is made up for by Confucianism, which emphasizes the Good without touching much on the True or the Beautiful. A relative lack of emphasis on Beauty in Buddhism is made up for in East Asia by Taoism. Bundled together, they work well. On the other hand, transporting Buddhism to the West without the other two does not work out well.

Judaism seems to me pretty solid. In theory, it should resemble Calvinism or Islam in discounting Beauty, since it shares their iconoclasm. But this does not seem to be the case, at all. Within Judaism, this seems to remain a prohibition against images of God, not against the arts. Which is, indeed, a separate and unrelated position. Judaism has a rich tradition of sacred storytelling. To the extent that a minority culture can, it also has a rich tradition of sacred music, sacred dance, and so forth. The only problem with Judaism in this regard, perhaps, is that it is ethnically and culturally based, and not easily available to us non-Jews.

Calvinism, within Christianity, seems to me to sadly lack both the Good and the Beautiful. No art, anything that smacks of art is of the devil; and no free will, so no moral issues. It seems to me only marginally religious. The Episcopalians, with their doctrinal looseness, seem to me weak on the Truth issue; it seems as though to them Truth does not matter, as long as you have Beauty. In Canada, the United Church as it now exists is similar, but without the Beauty. Good is all that matters. And so forth for other denominations.

To be fair, I can think of one area in which I find Catholic Christianity relatively lacking, and one or two other traditions stronger: humour. There is, within Christianity, a sense of scandal at laughter in a religious context. It feels blasphemous. I think this is wrong; Christianity is uptight here. It deprive God of some of his true personhood. Buddhism, by comparison, is full of jokes. Judaism enjoys a good knock-down argument with God, which seems to me healthy. Islam has the comic figure of Nasruddin. Hinduism has its “theology of play.”

Perhaps humour counts as a fourth transcendental: the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Funny.

And I feel there is a fifth transcendental, on which Christianity excels: Love. Or perhaps love is better defined as the proper response to the transcendentals, that of absolute attraction, of seeking them with your whole heart and your whole mind, to the neglect, if necessary, of everything else. I think it is fair to say that love is an important element in all religions: in Buddhism, in the doctrine of the Bodhisattva, in the figure of Guan Yin. In Hinduism, in the figure of Krishna, in the doctrine of bhakti yoga. In Islam, in Sufism and the Sufi poets. In Judaism, in the concept of the Shekhinah; you see it in Song of Songs.

But you can't beat the Christian formulation: God is Love.